Exceptional Prints: Raymond Pettibon

No Title (Hermosa Beach), 2019

Three-color lithograph with hand-coloring  on Saunders 410 gsm paper
 45 1/8 x 67 1/2 inches
 114.6 x 171.4 cm

“The image of the surfer who is utterly alone ... confronted by an immense wall of water, presents us with the primal scene of sublime experience.”

—Ulrich Loock, curator and art historian, 2015

An iconic work by the celebrated American artist Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Hermosa Beach) (2019) depicts a lone surfer in the barrel of a gigantic wave. Depictions of waves and surfers—a series begun in 1985—are among the artist’s most recognizable subjects, alluding to the surfaces of abstract expressionist canvases and the seascapes of J. M. W. Turner, as well as Pettibon’s deep reading of writers such as William Blake, Marcel Proust, John Ruskin, and Walt Whitman. Related works feature in significant museum collections, including The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Raymond Pettibon in his studio, New York, 2017

Surfers with longboards, Hermosa Beach, California, c. late 1970s

Greg Noll surfing at Waimea Bay, 1963

Born in 1957 and raised in Hermosa Beach, California, by academic parents, Pettibon’s childhood was filled with books, comics, basketball, baseball, and surfing. His oeuvre engages a wide spectrum of American iconography pulled from sources including literature, art history, philosophy, religion, politics, sports, and alternative youth culture.

“Growing up in Hermosa Beach,” Pettibon recalls, “[surfing] was part of my life, whether intimately or tangentially. It was part of the culture.... I had the posters. I used to read Surfer and Surfing magazines, Greg Noll at Makaha.”

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Hermosa Beach), 2019 (detail)

“Big-wave surfing is of epic proportions. It has to do with what you call the sublime, going back to Edmund Burke. It has to do with making artwork about nature at its most epic, its most ferocious. Caspar David Friedrich. Frederic Edwin Church. [J. M. W. ] Turner.”

—Raymond Pettibon

J. M. W. Turner, Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, 1842. Tate, London

Gustave Courbet, The Wave (La Vague), 1869. Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

Victor Hugo, Ma destinée, 1867. Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris

“Pettibon’s surfers at times appear as comic-strip, super-heroic projectiles, and then again, as frail tentative ghosts on the verge of vanishing within the cataracts of mounting ocean waves.... The surfing figures serve as metaphoric life preservers for the viewer.… Within the history of nineteenth-century art, Pettibon’s conversationalists range from … J. M. W. Turner and his late marines, to … Victor Hugo and his private drawings and experimental inkblots.”

—Brian Lukacher, art historian, 2015

Raymond Pettibon painting at David Zwirner, New York, 2011

“Regarded as matter, [a wave] is a mass; regarded as a force, it is an abstraction. It equalizes and unites all phenomena. It may be called the infinite in combination.... It dissolves all differences, and absorbs them into its own unity. Its elements are so numerous that it becomes identity.”

—Victor Hugo, 1888

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